South-East European Multi-Hazard Early Warning Advisory System

• Strengthened regional cooperation through leveraging of national, regional and global capacities to develop improved hydrometeorological forecasts, advisories and warnings, which will contribute to saving lives and reducing economic losses and damage
• Strengthened national MHEWS systems by making regional and sub-regional observing, monitoring and forecasting tools and data available to the participating countries and other beneficiaries
• Improved availability of impact-based forecasts and risk-based warning capacities that contribute to better informed decision-making by national governments, disaster management authorities, humanitarian agencies, and NGOs
• Harmonized forecasts and warnings among the NMHSs especially in transboundary areas of the region
• Increased operational forecasting capabilities of NMHSs staff

The first phase of the SEE-MHEWS-A project in 2016-2017 was supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance ($580,000). During this inception phase, a detailed Implementation Plan was developed that provides guidelines for development of the technical part of the system and for all activities necessary to establish advisory system operations. In addition, the plan considers the governance structure and other management aspects of the project implementation. The plan was developed as a joint effort between WMO, NMHSs of the region, and numerous collaborators, including WMO Regional Specialized Meteorological Centers, research institutions, numerical weather prediction consortia, and European and US meteorological and/or hydrological services. 

The second phase of the SEE-MHEWS-A project concentrates on development and implementation of a pilot hydrological modelling system embedded in a numerical weather prediction system, forming the basis of the comprehensive operational regional advisory system. Technical Assistance to this phase of the project is provided with financial support (1,800,000 USD) from the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the European Union, the latter under the EU-WB/GFDRR Western Balkans DRM Program managed by the World Bank and GFDRR. 

Observations and data exchange for SEE-MHEWS-A 

Currently, there is a lack of observational as well as high-resolution model data for many areas in the SEE region. As part of the project activities, Observational requirements for the SEE-MHEWS-A project and inventory of available data was prepared. In November 2019, the project countries agreed to extend their cooperation regarding data exchange with development and signing of the Policy on the Exchange of Hydrological and Meteorological Data, Information, Forecasts and Advisories under the South-East European Multi-Hazard Early Warning Advisory System. This Policy provides technical and conceptual principles required to promote data, information, forecast, and warning exchange and interoperability within the SEE region. This will allow access to a large quantity of additional observations, which are currently not shared regionally, to be utilized for various project purposes, such as numerical weather prediction data assimilation and verification, hydrological modelling and nowcasting. The Data Policy has been signed by 15 NMHSs from the region as well as European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), who is supporting the implementation of the Policy. The signatories of the Policy provide additional observations to those they routinely share via Global Telecommunication System (GTS). These additional observations are collected in the Central Observational Database (CODB) for SEE-MHEWS-A hosted by the ECMWF. Pilot version of the CODB was developed to facilitate data collection, assimilation, model verification, post-processing and nowcasting. By March 2021, over 25,000 additional daily observations are being provided regularly by the countries to ECMWF.